Comment 4 for bug 1130781

> I'm not sure if it doesn't auto-mount due to clock skew or not,

Well, this is exactly the diagnosis given in the message you linked to. So if it's clock skew, it must be a bad system clock, or a bad clock value in your BIOS clock.

> if I login and manually mount at as root, then it works fine.

That's not surprising, if the clock is being set from NTP immediately afterwards. This could happen because the /etc/network/if-up.d/ntpdate script which sets the clock also does this in the background, so if you have a bad system clock and are getting the time from the network, there's a race condition and the clock may not yet be set by the time the attempt is made to mount the share.

> It's hard for me to troubleshoot this now as I was trying this in
> February & it is now October. This machine has long ago been rebuilt.

I take this to mean that you're no longer able to reproduce the problem. The contents of the ntp package do certainly indicate a race condition, so there's a real bug; but without further information about why this was causing problems for you specifically, the theory is that this only happens with a broken BIOS clock, so is a low priority to fix.